The Far West (8 page)

I could feel the professor’s spell building up behind us as we approached the main channel of the river and the cold river water rose up over my boots. Then the Great Barrier thinned right in front of us. The guide pulled on the lead rope to hurry the mammoth up, and I gave it a little nudge, the same way I did when I wanted it to finish eating from one feed trough so I could clean it while the mammoth started on the second one. The mammoth plodded forward.

The Great Barrier Spell shivered as the guide rode through, and a second later, the mammoth reached it. As it did, the Great Barrier rippled and bulged toward the mammoth, right where Professor Torgeson’s spell had thinned it out. I could see little flashes of light all around the edges, as if the Great Barrier was trying to get to the mammoth in spite of the professor’s spell.

The water under the thin spot began to swirl and bubble. The mammoth jerked back, raised its head, and trumpeted angrily. Water splashed everywhere, some from the mammoth’s thrashing and some from the bubbling in the river. The lead rope almost pulled the guide’s horse off its feet; the guide loosened it from around his saddle horn just in time.

The muleteers backed their horses, tightening the control ropes on either side of the mammoth. The water around the mammoth — and around all of us — was churning and seething. I could feel my horse fighting to keep his feet.

The mammoth trumpeted again and backed away from
the Great Barrier. It tossed its head from side to side, trying to catch the lead rope with its tusks and break it. Before it could pull free, I let my world-sensing expand, so that I could find the best place to nudge the mammoth forward.

I gasped as the feel of magic crashed into me. The Great Barrier Spell loomed just ahead, as large and strong and ancient-feeling as ever, like a huge, aged oak tree or a living mountain. I could feel Professor Torgeson’s spell, flowing through a small part of the Great Barrier and pushing it aside, or trying to. It felt like the professor was trying to hold the river back from one particular spot with just her hands. I felt the mammoth, unhappy and frightened on top, but with some of the same ancient living strength as the Great Barrier underneath.

I felt the spells in the mammoth’s harness like steel wire stretched almost to its breaking point. The Great Barrier Spell pressed against them, trying to get at the mammoth, while the mammoth tried to tear free of both the Great Barrier and the harness. Lan’s spells hadn’t been meant to stand up to that kind of strain, and they wouldn’t last much longer.

Lan’s spells.

I reached for the harness spells, wrapping them in my own magic. Then I took a deep breath and pushed my own magic
into
the harness spells, as hard as ever I could push. You aren’t supposed to be able to do that with Avrupan magic. Once you cast a spell, you can’t change it. If you want it to be more or less powerful, you have to stop the first spell and start over with a new one. You can’t do anything directly to another person’s spell at all, except break it. If you’re a really good magician,
you can fit a new spell around someone else’s spell, but that’s like two gears fitting together in a steam engine.

That’s how Avrupan magic is supposed to work, anyway. But I’d been using Aphrikan magic on my Avrupan spells for years, tweaking them from the outside to get them to work properly. It didn’t seem like much of a stretch to tweak them from the inside for once. And Lan was my twin; his spells felt as much like mine as my own spells did. Also, I was pretty desperate.

The spells on the harness flared and buckled, and for a moment, I thought I’d made a terrible mistake and they were going to collapse completely. Then the wooden pendant heated against my skin, and my grip on the spells steadied. They felt like lines of fire wrapped around the mammoth, holding and gentling it.

The mammoth stopped fighting and lowered its head. The guide pulled the lead rope tight, and this time the mammoth surged forward. The muleteers and I went with it. I felt the Great Barrier Spell looking me over, as it always did, and then we were through.

I relaxed my hold on the harness spells and sagged in my saddle, hoping the mammoth wouldn’t take a sudden notion to head elsewhere at speed. Dimly, I felt the Great Barrier Spell flow back into place as Professor Torgeson ended her spell. A few minutes later, we were all gathered on the west bank.

The head guide cast the travel protection spells and we started south along the river, so as to get far enough from the ford to avoid anyone else who might come across. We didn’t go far, just a mile or two, and then we made camp, even though it was only mid-afternoon. It was the first camp we’d made on the west side of the river, so setting up was a lot more complicated than it had been so far.

Even though the west bank had mostly been settled for a good twenty years, it was plenty dangerous because the river attracted wildlife. We couldn’t use the wagonrests — the mammoth just wouldn’t fit, and we didn’t want to be inside any walls with the mammoth if it got upset all of a sudden — so the professor and the guides had to cast extra protection spells, and we had to dig our own firepit and haul water from the river.

As soon as we were settled, Professor Torgeson and Roger came over to find out what I’d done out in the middle of the river. I explained as best I could, and when I finished, the professor sat quiet for a long while.

“Twins,” she said finally. “One of them a double-seventh son, the other a seventh daughter. It has to be … unless … Eff, have you and your brother done anything like this before?”

“Lan and I tried casting spells together a couple of times, when we were really little,” I offered. “It never worked, and —” I stopped short and glanced sidelong at Roger.

“And?”

“And after a while, we quit trying.”

Professor Torgeson’s eyes narrowed. “You quit trying? Just like that?”

“It was only a couple of times,” I said. “That was the summer that Lan was off with the boys all the time, and besides …” I hesitated, but I could tell by looking at her that Professor Torgeson was going to keep on asking until she was satisfied she’d gotten to the bottom of things. “Besides, I was worried about messing up his magic then. On account of me being a thirteenth child.”

Roger looked startled, then frowned. Professor Torgeson gave a disdainful sniff. “Avrupans!” she said, and added a string of words in Vinish that I thought might be swearing. “I am surprised that your father believes such superstitions.”

“It wasn’t Papa,” I said indignantly. “It was everybody else!”

“Indeed?” The professor looked skeptical, but she let it go in favor of grilling me more specifically about what I’d done to
the harness spells. When she finally finished with me, she went over to the mammoth and spent another hour casting spells to analyze the ones on the harness.

Roger hung back for a moment. “She’s right, you know,” he said a little hesitantly.

“I can’t help it that it’s not supposed to work that way,” I said. “I had to do something. And it worked, didn’t it?”

“I don’t mean about the harness spells,” Roger said, sounding even more uncomfortable than before. “I meant about the other business. The unlucky thirteen. It really isn’t important.”

I stared at him for a minute while what he said sank in. Then I smiled. “Thank you.” He nodded and went off to help the professor, but I felt considerably happier for the rest of the day.

Next morning, the professor asked if I would be willing to experiment on a few other spells, to see if I could do the same thing I’d done with the mammoth’s harness. I wasn’t happy about the idea at first, but Professor Torgeson assured me that they’d be small spells, nothing dangerous. Eventually, I agreed to try.

Professor Torgeson set up a row of rocks along the far side of the camp and cast different spells on each of them. She had the two guides cast a couple, too. Then I went down the row, trying to push my magic into each of them, the way I had with the harness spells.

It didn’t work, not even once. Most of the time, I just bounced off, but twice I broke the spell. By the time I finished, I had a tearing headache, and I told the professor I wasn’t going
to try anything like that again until I was somewhere where I could take a nap afterward.

The rest of the trip to the new menagerie and study center went well. The mammoth didn’t give us any more trouble, except once, and then it turned out that he’d smelled a spectral bear sneaking around the edge of the protection spells to try to get to our supplies. Professor Torgeson shot the bear before it could break through and damage anything, so it was a good thing the mammoth had acted up after all.

We reached the new Northern Plains Wildlife Study Center fifteen days after leaving Mill City. It was built on a part of the original land grant that the National Assembly in Washington had offered to all the states and territories that had been on the side of the Union during the Secession War. The college had originally kept it in hopes that the land on the west side of the Mammoth would be worth more once the settlers started moving in, and then when the railroad bought up a good part of their grant on the east side of the river, they just hung on to it for lack of any need to do anything with it.

It was a varied piece of land, stretching from the marshes along the north side of Lake Le Grande across rolling plains with an occasional patch of forest. The study center had been built on the shore of a long, skinny arm of the lake that thrust through the marsh into the prairie. A low, thick-walled cluster of buildings made of fieldstone occupied the middle of the study center. The smaller ones were living quarters; the larger ones were laboratories and a few offices.

The central buildings were surrounded by a palisade wall with several observation towers, but the holding pens, cages,
and fenced-in areas for larger animals were outside the palisade, along with a long building for supplies. Some of the pens were already occupied, but there were plenty of empty ones for new acquisitions.

The whole complex had been designed to use as few protection spells as possible, because you can’t study wildlife if you drive it all away before you even get a look at it. The college had borrowed a lot of the tricks the Rationalists used to make their settlements safe without magic, like putting half the rooms underground and setting up a double palisade wall, and then adding just a few spells to make things even safer. There were a couple of guard spells on the living quarters, and an alarm spell out around the outer edges of the land, but that was all.

The guides, Professor Torgeson, and her students went off to the administration building to let everyone know we’d arrived, while the muleteers and I took the mammoth to the biggest pen and let it loose. I stayed to watch it explore its new home. A few minutes later, Professor Torgeson and Professor Jeffries appeared, walking out from the palisade. They looked like they were having an argument, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying until they got quite close.

“— completely irresponsible,” Professor Torgeson was saying. “If this had happened in Mill City —”

“It wouldn’t have happened in Mill City,” Professor Jeffries said calmly. “It was the trip back through the Great Barrier Spell that disrupted the preservation spells.”

“They should have been checked and reapplied immediately. It was —”

“— completely irresponsible, yes, you’ve said that at least four times.” Professor Jeffries sounded like he was getting irritated, which hardly ever happens. “It simply wasn’t possible.”

“You could have —”

“— unpacked the eggs right there on the dock, and checked each one in the middle of West Landing?”

Professor Torgeson paused. “Of course not,” she said reluctantly. “But as soon as you got here …”

“By then the shells had cracked on those three, and it was too late to recast the spells,” Professor Jeffries said. “At least it wasn’t the whole clutch; we still have plenty of specimen eggs under preservation.”

“It’s not the ones that are still preserved that concern me!” Professor Torgeson snapped.

“Yes, yes, you’ve made that quite clear,” Professor Jeffries said. “Good afternoon, Miss Rothmer! I see you brought our mammoth back in fine shape. Did you have a good trip? How do you like our new facilities?”

“Good afternoon, Professor,” I said. “The pens look great; we’ll have room for a lot more animals now.”

Professor Torgeson muttered something I didn’t catch, and Professor Jeffries smiled. “Yes, and you’ll have to come and see our latest acquisition. We have three baby medusa lizards to study.”

I felt my eyes go wide. “M-medusa lizards?”

“Baby ones,” the professor said, nodding cheerfully. “Though at the rate they’re growing, they won’t stay that way for long. When they hatched, they were about eight inches
long, nose to tail-tip, but they’ve doubled in size in the last two weeks.”

“Samuel, you are quite mad,” Professor Torgeson announced. “You’re lucky they haven’t turned you to stone, or —”

“Oh, I doubt that’s a danger,” Professor Jeffries said. “They haven’t developed their third eye yet, the one that Lefevre thinks controls the petrifying ability. Besides …” He hesitated, looking embarrassed. “I believe they’ve taken me for their … parent.”

Professor Torgeson stared at him. “Parent. You — how —”

“I was the first thing they saw when they came out of their eggs, and I’ve been feeding them since then,” Professor Jeffries said. “Don’t glare like that. Once it was clear that they were hatching, someone had to be there to observe, and I could hardly ask one of the assistant professors to take the risk, could I?”

“So you knew it was a risk, at least,” Professor Torgeson said.

Professor Jeffries gave her a reproving look. “I am not an imbecile, Aldis. Still, it’s quite convenient, the way things turned out. Think of how much we can learn from live specimens! Though I confess I am glad it was only the three; forty-eight of them at once would be a bit much. Come and see.”

Professor Torgeson and I exchanged glances, then followed Professor Jeffries along the wall and into the long supply building. “I thought it would be best to keep them isolated from the other animals, just in case,” he said, waving toward a
cage at the far end of the room. “Though I imagine we’ll have to move them outside in a few months.”

The three baby medusa lizards looked like a cross between a bird, a snake, and a giant frog. Their heads were long and pointed like a bird’s beak, and they already had teeth. Their bodies were longer and thinner than I remembered, covered in pale brown scales. Their front legs were short, and their back legs were long and muscular. As soon as they saw Professor Jeffries, all three ran to the side of the cage and began opening and closing their mouths in excitement.

“They haven’t made a sound yet,” Professor Jeffries said. “This one is Stheno, and that’s Euryale.”

“I suppose there’s a certain symmetry in naming them after the three Gorgons,” Professor Torgeson said. “I presume the third one is Medusa?”

Professor Jeffries shook his head. “A medusa lizard named Medusa would be confusing, and in any case, the third one is male. So I’m calling him Fred.”

“Stheno, Euryale, and Fred.” Professor Torgeson sighed.

“They already answer to their names,” Professor Jeffries told her. “And they haven’t shown any sign of turning things to stone yet. They do, however, resist and absorb magic just as their adult counterparts do.”

Professor Torgeson straightened up and her eyes narrowed. “You’re sure it’s the same?”

“So far as I can measure,” Professor Jeffries told us. “I’ll show you my notes when we get back to the main lab. And that means —”

“— that we have something to test our spells on,” Professor Torgeson said. She sounded grimly pleased.

“Exactly.”

Before we left the building, Professor Jeffries took one of the medusa lizards out of the cage to show us close up. It was quiet as long as he held it, but when he started to give it to Professor Torgeson, it tried to bite her. He calmed it down and put it back, then showed me how to feed the lizards. Fortunately, they weren’t too picky; they seemed to prefer meat, when they could get it, but they gobbled up just about anything we put in front of them. Then we finished up walking around the pens and went inside the palisade to see the labs and living quarters.

The two professors spent the rest of the afternoon holed up in one of the offices, going over Professor Jeffries’s notes and planning what to do next. Professor Jeffries hadn’t told anyone outside the study center about the live medusa lizards yet, so one of the first things I did was to copy out a letter from Professor Jeffries to Dean Farley, Mr. Parsons, and the Frontier Management Department in Washington to let them know.

The guides and muleteers left the next day, but the students, Mr. Olsen and Mr. Yarmouth, stayed at the center to tend the menagerie animals and help get all the supplies and equipment unpacked and set up or put away. Professor Jeffries and Professor Torgeson spent most of their time with the medusa lizards, making observations and testing spells.

Three days after we arrived, Mr. Siwinski showed up, to be the first of the permanent staff members at the study center.
He was a short, stout man in his mid-forties, with hair that was rapidly going gray. He had a thick accent from somewhere in Eastern Avrupa. He’d been educated in Prague, and as soon as he finished, he’d gotten his papers together and come to Columbia, hoping to study the wildlife. He’d worked his way across the states until he got to the territories and Professor Jeffries hired him.

Mr. Siwinski brought letters from Mama and the rest of the family. Mama didn’t say anything straight out, but she was plainly none too happy about me staying at the center, even if it was only a bit over ten miles from the river and only for the rest of the summer. She hadn’t heard about the medusa lizard hatchlings yet, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her.